All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Jason Dittz, news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How's things?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So I was thinking there's, you know, three or four wars and revolutions and things I want to ask you about, starting with Libya, which apparently Donald Trump and the birth certificate is a far more important news story than Libya.
You would think a brand new war would be worth news coverage for a couple of weeks, but nah, that's pretty much over with as far as TV is concerned.
But I was looking at what you were writing at news.antiwar.com, and it seemed like, nope, the war's still going on over there.
How's it going?
Are the civilians nice and protected?
Well, it's really hard to tell what's going on in the war, because as you say, there's not a lot of coverage.
And that's true not just in U.S. media outlets, but internationally.
Of course, NATO is still dropping bombs across the nation.
The Qaddafi forces are still trying to take over the city of Misrata.
I think a lot of the lack of coverage is the fact that there haven't been major changes on the ground.
It's been largely a stalemate, with neither side able to do much more than move the front line a few feet one way or the other in some of these cities that are being contested.
And it seems like what's ultimately going to have to happen is some sort of partition, because neither side seems to be able to defeat the other.
Well, now, so what about the Reaper drones?
That's changing everything, right?
Well, it's adding another element, but so far they've been used kind of sparingly.
And while NATO's talking up escalating the number of strikes over the past few days, I don't really think that what NATO's doing is going to mean an awful lot on the ground one way or another.
Are they trying to assassinate Qaddafi?
Is that it?
They say they're not, but they're also bombing his house.
And they're also saying, well, if we keep bombing his house, he might move to a barracks, which would be a legitimate target.
So it's really hard to tell.
As with everything else in this war, it's all sort of vaguely defined, and there aren't really concrete goals or strategies.
Wow, so was that the plan, or there just really was no plan?
I guess that's anyone's guess, but to me it seems like there really was no plan, and that this was, much like Egypt, what happened in Libya took everybody by surprise, and they just decided one Thursday afternoon, hey, I bet we can get the United Nations to approve a no-fly zone.
And somebody said, hey, I bet we could use that as a pretext for war, and within a couple of days the bombs were being dropped, and nobody really asked, what's this war going to accomplish?
How's it going to be fought?
What's the endgame strategy, which is the key thing?
The thing is, Gates asked those things publicly, basically.
He kind of gave the senators a dressing down and said, look, man, there's no such thing as just a no-fly zone, all right?
That means we're getting into a war.
That's going to mean we've got to start bombing targets on the ground, and then obviously the next domino is we've got to make sure that the bad guys don't win, no matter what.
It means we're there for the long haul.
Right, and not long after that, Secretary Gates also said that Libya was not a vital American interest.
There was no national security interest in going to war here, but they did it anyway.
I don't think it was something that was some sort of carefully drawn-out scheme to get us into another war.
I think it was just hastiness and a determination not to look like they were standing on the sidelines, that they just decided they were going to get involved in a war here.
Yeah.
Well, and I can't help but think that somewhere in the conversation was, you know what, and if we're stuck there forever, cool.
Why not?
Well, I'm sure that's a factor too, but whether that was a factor for the top leadership or just for the military contractors that are going to make billions of dollars on building all these bombs to drop on Libya, I don't know.
Yeah.
Now, let's see, I guess a couple of weeks ago there was some talk in NATO and an American general too, I think, had said that, yeah, you know, it's time to start thinking about putting in the ground troops.
Has there been much more talk like that so far?
Publicly, no.
Publicly, probably.
I think there's been a lot of talk of, the United Nations directive that was used as a pretext for the war was so clear about you can't send in ground troops.
It's very explicit right in there, and that was the only way they were able to get the Arab League to go along with the no-fly zone.
Well, but doesn't it say no armies of occupation?
Right.
But they sold that to the Arab League as this means no ground troops.
And now they're saying, well, they might be able to argue around it, but it's also going to cost them support internationally, which seems to be the only reason that they're not sending in ground troops.
It seems like escalating this into an even bigger quagmire doesn't even enter into it.
It's just a question of how bad will it look to the Arab League if we do it.
But I've also heard unofficially that there already are some ground troops there.
I mean, above and beyond the CIA operatives, which were there before the war even started.
Well, and that still just means Special Operations Command guys, or that means the U.S. Army's building the base on the ground?
Well, I'm not really sure how far it goes.
There's certainly not publicly there, but privately there certainly are some troops there.
And Special Operations Forces or what, I'm not really sure.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it seems to me like even if they kill Qaddafi, they still have to guarantee the new democratic government there and whatever nonsense, train up a new army and all that.
And then their other options are, you know, the Iraq model from the 90s, just blockade them and bomb them forever, at least half the country, and do a no-fly, no-drive zone thing and try to keep that permanent at some point.
Or admit defeat.
Admit, oops, we shouldn't have done this at all, and now we're just going to go, and yeah, Qaddafi's going to win, but what are you going to do?
I mean, those are their three options.
The third one is not an option for any president but Ron Paul.
And the other two are really messy, and I guess the second leads back to the first anyway.
Eventually, they're going to have to force a regime change here for too long, probably.
Yeah, that certainly does seem to be the long-term consequence of the war.
They continue to insist that the war isn't about regime change, but it's sort of hard to buy that, except for the fact that they won't really say what the war is about.
And that it might just be that they've done so little thinking on this before they started dropping bombs that they really don't know what this war is about, except that they all decided they were going to have a war.
Well, it seems like, I mean, I don't really know, but I guess that oil's got to have a lot to do with the motivation of the French and the Italians and the British in this thing.
But I don't know why Americans got to go and pay for all this and do the killing and dying in it.
Well, sure, the oil's got to be a factor for a lot of this, but I think the oil would be there anyway once this gets resolved, whether it's resolved by a partition or what.
Both sides are going to have to sell oil.
And it really doesn't matter to whom, so long as it's on the open market.
Now, this piece this morning in the New York Times, NATO says it is stepping up attacks on Libya targets.
How much of a stepping up is this?
They're still just talking about drones and airplanes, huh?
So far, yeah.
Days, not weeks, they said.
Remember that, weeks ago?
Now, Jason, how goes the revolution in Yemen, from what you can understand where you're sitting?
Well, it's a complicated situation like anything else, but it seems to be going pretty well.
Exactly how it's going to shake out is another matter, but increasingly, the Salih government has very little control outside of the capital city.
A lot of the provinces are basically behaving as independent countries at this point.
As far as internal policy goes, there's really been no effort by the regime to retake a lot of the southern provinces, and particularly the two northernmost tribal provinces, since the tribesmen basically chased out the military forces.
Both ends of the country had longstanding separatist movements before this happened, but with the addition of hundreds of thousands of protesters in the capital city, it's really sort of split the military's ability to crack down on separatists.
And also, there have been quite a few defections from the military into the protest movement, which has made his control over the capital city pretty tenuous, too.
Yeah, well, I keep reading that Salih keeps saying, all right, I'll leave at the end of the year, and they keep saying not good enough, and then he keeps saying, well, fine, then I won't leave ever, and then they keep saying, oh, well, maybe we should have taken the deal, and it keeps going back and forth like that.
Is that about where it stands now?
Basically, the thing is, there are some political factions which were sort of late comers to the protest movement, which seemed interested in making some sort of deal with Salih, where he would leave office in some predetermined amount of time.
Sometimes it's end of the year, sometimes it's 60 days, a couple of times it's been 30 days.
But the downside of that is he's just handing over power to his vice president, who's also a top military general, and nothing else really changes.
So for the protesters, it doesn't seem like a great option, because their problem isn't just that Salih is their multi-decade military strongman ruler, it's that there's a military strongman ruler at all.
Yeah, of course.
Well, I guess the good news is, as you're saying, well, I don't know how good it is for who, it depends, but it sounds like, like you're saying, as soon as the protest movement really rose up in the capital city, the two provinces in the north, the Shiite faction in the north and the socialist faction in the south, they had their opportunity to go ahead and gain de facto independence because the troops all had to go back to the capital city to try to protect what was left of the government there.
So we already have sort of de facto secession, and now it looks like this guy, whether it's 30 or 60 days or the end of the year or something, it sure does seem like his days are numbered.
But then, I guess as you're saying, it depends whether they just get saddled with the next dictator in line or whether they're able to actually do something about it.
Seems like, I guess, without the other provinces and permanent war to deal with there, if there really is secession, then maybe the people in the central part of the country will be able to focus their energies on making sure they have a say in the way things go, you know?
Well, that's certainly the hope, and it seems difficult to believe that Saleh or anyone else is going to be able to put all these pieces back together at the end of this protest when it does in fact end.
All these provinces that are out of their control, even the central provinces, while they're not really active secessionist movements, the tribesmen there have been killing troops just on general principle, pretty much, and those areas have basically become no-man's lands.
They don't really have designs on being an independent country so much as being just tribal areas.
All right, well, so talk to me a bit about Bahrain.
Well, Bahrain is sort of the big mess of the region, and it's interesting that it's the mess nobody really wants to talk about.
It's been sparsely covered in some of the European media, basically not covered at all in the American media.
Incredibly, the only places you really find coverage are in the Middle East's own media, and in Iran's media in particular, because they've got, of course, a keen interest in the Shiite movement there.
But the latest out of there over the past week or so is the Bahraini government saying those 1,500 GCC troops that invaded last month aren't leaving, ever.
They're basically going to be a permanent presence in Bahrain, supposedly as a stabilization movement, but with martial law imposed during the course of the protests, Bahrain is sort of the anti-Egypt or the anti-Syria.
I mean, we've had these protest movements against state-of-emergency martial law-type rule, and Bahrain didn't really have that to start with.
They were mostly complaining about religious discrimination, and they wound up with the state-of-emergency and the martial law and the foreign invasion forces on top of it as a result of the protests.
And how many people have died in the Bahrain protests?
Is there any kind of HRW or UN estimate?
It's really difficult to say.
The closest thing I've seen to a death count was the official government figures, which said 23, which seems ridiculously low considering the number of hospitals that were attacked, the number of times that hundreds of thousands of people were marching around the Pearl Roundabout when tanks rolled in, and the number of reports we've had of people just dying in prison.
But I think we really don't know what the overall death toll is.
Or the long-term consequences of all this, because, of course, it's the Shiite majority that's being repressed there, the Shiite supermajority on that little island that's being repressed there.
Of course, the Fifth Fleet is stationed there.
But I was talking with Gareth Porter about how things are shaking out in Iraq and how a lot of this Arab Spring is going to reverberate largely on the major conflict in the region, which is Saudi Arabia versus Iran, and who's got more dominance in the Persian Gulf, for one thing.
And it seems like America and the Sunni minority in Bahrain getting away with such bloody murder against the Shiite majority there is going to reverberate.
It's already reverberating in Iraq, and certainly it's got a lot of attention.
If you read Iranian state press TV and their website, for example, it's just like any of the rest of this stuff.
The only thing predictable about the consequences is that there will be plenty of them.
It could go this way or that.
Absolutely.
And the consequences within Bahrain are another thing which I think the officials don't seem to be considering.
It seems like Bahrain's royal family is just convinced that they won because they chased all the protesters off the street and it's over now.
But I think the resentment from that violent crackdown, from all the repressive measures, the new martial law that's been imposed, I think that's going to eventually turn this into a much, much bigger fight for the nation's Shiite majority.
All right, and now I know that the protests in Syria have been really bloody.
Does it look like, or I don't know, whatever you think is the most important question about Syria, I was just thinking, you know, how tenuous is the Baathist grip on power there, that kind of thing, I don't even know really.
It's really hard to say how good their control over the country is, but one thing that certainly seems to be the case is that every time they launch one of these violent crackdowns against a major protest, the protesters are out within the next week in even larger numbers.
So it seems like killing the protesters, and they've killed quite a few, one of the human rights groups put the figure at over 400 yesterday.
It doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything for the Baathist government, it's just making people all the more eager to protest against them.
All right, well thanks very much Jason, we're very lucky to have you.
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com, for his thousands of opinion pieces there.
